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Party Love at Cirque de Cannes

CANNES, France — There were some parties here the other night. Of course there are parties here every night, because who wouldn’t want to celebrate being on the French Riviera, for decades a symbol of sun-dappled, Champagne-fueled luxury? Especially during the Cannes Film Festival, the annual pageant of haut aesthetics and a beacon to starlets since the early days of the bikini.

But two parties on Saturday night went above and beyond. At the grand InterContinental Carlton Cannes, Gilles Jacob, the president of the festival, held an elegant and exclusive dinner in honor of Robert De Niro, the head of this year’s competition jury. Over foie gras and grilled turbot, Mr. Jacob and Frédéric Mitterrand, France’s minister of culture, spoke floridly about Mr. De Niro as artist and civic hero in his role as a founder of the Tribeca Film Festival.

“All the fundamentalists in the world can do nothing against artistic protest,” Mr. Jacob said. While guests like Bradley Cooper and Naomi Campbell looked on, Mr. De Niro was awarded access to France’s archives on his work.

“You’re going to make me cry,” Mr. De Niro said, though he didn’t.

Emotions were running hotter across the Croisette, the seaside central boulevard, where the wandering black-tie hordes tried to get into a party given by Red Granite Pictures, a Los Angeles film production company. To promote its expansion into the international market, Red Granite booked a little beach show starring Kanye West. Add Leonardo DiCaprio, slinking around in a baseball cap, whose coming film project “The Wolf of Wall Street” the company had just bought; a fireworks display; and a rumored price tag of $1 million, and it was the most talked-about party of the night.

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Kanye Westperformed at a beach party given by Red Granite Pictures on Saturday night.Credit
Andrew H. Walker/Getty Images

Mr. West played for more than an hour, bringing Jamie Foxx onstage to perform the hit “Gold Digger,” and sweating through his white suit as he implored the sound guys to go louder. “Impeccable!” a Frenchman pronounced toward the end of the show, then went back to dancing and smoking.

“It feels like there’s a little bit of a return to showmanship now,” Howard Cohen, a Cannes veteran and a co-president of the independent distributor Roadside Attractions, said on Sunday night, from a charity dinner aboard a yacht. Or as Jeffrey Katzenberg, the chief executive of DreamWorks Animation, had put it on land a few days earlier, “Cannes represents two amazing, sometimes incongruous elements, which is the high art of excellence in cinema — real genuine love of movies — and then circus.” This year, Mr. Katzenberg added, “we’ve been mostly circus.”

Mr. Cohen said the Sundance Film Festival was still more relevant for American indies. But he and Mr. Katzenberg both said that they felt Cannes retained its place — and its marketing investment — as a prestige festival globally.

“If you’re a high-profile studio movie that wants to launch for the international market, it’s great,” Mr. Cohen said. (“Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides” filled that A-list celebrity role this year.)

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Robert De Niro was honored at a party given by the president of the Cannes festival.Credit
Guillaume Horcajuelo/European Pressphoto Agency

DreamWorks Animation started the festival on Wednesday with a stuntlike news conference for “Puss in Boots,” its animated prequel to “Shrek,” with the stars, Antonio Banderas and Salma Hayek, cavorting on a pier around a giant pair of boots, installed secretly overnight.

The original “Shrek” had its premiere in competition in 2001, a controversial decision — animation was a rarity in the festival then. “It was very rewarding, actually, to hear all the European intellectuality laughing out loud,” Mr. Banderas said, “after watching three Czechoslovakian movies that were very profound about the human spirit.”

But Mr. Banderas, also a star of Pedro Almodóvar’s film “The Skin I Live In,” which is also screening here in competition, hastened to add that the festival’s programmers must “keep the parameter of quality” in everything they present. The competition, he said, “is actually the column that sustains the festival.”

Though no clear favorite has emerged among the competition films, there are titles that have attracted critical and blogger love, like Lynne Ramsay’s “We Have to Talk About Kevin”; “The Artist,” a silent film shot in black and white and set in 1927 Hollywood; and “The Kid With a Bike,” from the Dardenne brothers, Cannes favorites.

That the media is ready to add weight to anything attached to Cannes was evident at another DreamWorks spectacle, a news conference last week for “Kung Fu Panda 2.” In response to a question about the existential problems of pandas, Jack Black went on a stream-of-consciousness riff — “Those weak moments, while gnawing on a bamboo shoot, do they think: ‘What is life all about? What is the point, in this meaningless universe that goes on forever?’ ” — while Angelina Jolie appeared unruffled as she declined to comment on the death of Osama bin Laden. (“I’m here in the context of ‘Kung Fu Panda,’ ” she said briskly.)

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This horse showed up at a party at the V.I.P. Room. Why? Nobody knew.

The festival’s most eagerly awaited film, Terrence Malick’s “Tree of Life,” had multiple, invitation-only screenings on Monday, all at the Grand Théâtre Lumière, the largest theater here, and the reclusive Mr. Malick was a no-show.

“I don’t know why it’s accepted that people who make things in our business are then expected to sell them,” Brad Pitt, a star of “The Tree of Life,” said at the news conference, comparing Mr. Malick to an architect who need not play the role of realtor.

Right: in Cannes, there is already a framework for selling and marketing, and sometimes it actually involves real estate. After its competition premiere on Sunday night, “The Artist,” bought by the Weinstein Company, had a soiree in a mansion outside of town. Partygoers took in the artfully lighted courtyard, complete with Romanesque fountains, danced in an indoor disco room and drank from the many bars serving whiskey and Champagne. Like other events here, it was reserved for guests with formal, paper invitations, a hassle for V.I.P.’s used to calling in favors or being on the list.

“The Cannes film festival is orgasmic for the French,” Rob Lowe said, “because it allows them to indulge their propensity to never give you a table under any circumstances.”

Of course Mr. Lowe, the actor and, lately, author, had no trouble getting in anywhere, including the dinner for Mr. De Niro. He was in town as a partner in what he called “the reconstituted Miramax,” the company founded by the Weinstein brothers and formerly owned by the Walt Disney Company. As Miramax was preparing to announce a digital subscription deal with Netflix for its library, including “Pulp Fiction,” “Shakespeare in Love” and “Good Will Hunting” on Monday, its new president, Mike Lang, was busy introducing himself to international buyers.

“We did this brunch today — we took speedboats over the Cap d’Antibes with all the distributors,” he said, still sounding impressed hours later.

“I’ve never been to Cannes before,” he added. “It’s crazy. I had no idea people stay up until 4 a.m.”

He was learning quickly, though. Along with Mr. Lowe, he turned up at a party on Friday night to see Duran Duran perform. Held at the beachside V.I.P. Room — “Famous Club” the sign out front read, helpfully — the event was sponsored by Belvedere Vodka as a benefit for an AIDS charity. It felt more like a surreal Eurovison dream sequence, with lasers, giant bubble balloons, waiters in leather kilts delivering giant liquor bottles adorned with sparklers, women in feathers and fur hats and little else, a spinning dance floor, and a little person dressed as Cupid, complete with bow and arrow.

“Owen Wilson and I found ourselves sort of trapped in a corner,” Mr. Lowe said, “and all I kept thinking is, this is the most decadent, beautiful, freaky fire hazard I’ve ever been a part of.”

Around 2 a.m. a horse wandered through the club courtyard. The party’s organizers had no idea where it came from or why it was there, but they led it onto the red carpet nonetheless.

A version of this article appears in print on May 17, 2011, on page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: At Cirque de Cannes, Party Love and Movie Love: Smile Though Your Art Is Aching. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe